Tag: pain

Jacques Knight: A Promenade With The Gilets Jaunes In Paris Along with flashbang stun grenades, the tear-gas grenades were the MVP of crowd control. Securely positioned in lateral streets, riot police equipped with grenade launchers would lob instant pain into the crowd every now and then. A direct hit from a stun grenade recently cost

MUSIC Music as a repellant — Bach at the Burger King: Baroque music seems to make the most potent repellant. “[D]espite a few assertive, late-Romantic exceptions like Mussorgsky and Rachmaninoff,” notes critic Scott Timberg, “the music used to scatter hoodlums is pre-Romantic, by Baroque or Classical-era composers such as Vivaldi or Mozart.” Public administrators seldom

DICTATORS Daniel Kalder on what he’s learned upon reading several books written by dictators. Fidel Castro was a great admirer of Ernest Hemingway. He met the hard living, Nobel Prize winning author twice, and kept a signed photo of “Papa” on his desk. Unlike Hemingway, however, Castro was not known for his brevity and could

GOOD vs. EVIL Why is modern-day pop culture obsessed with good vs. evil themes? Good guy/bad guy narratives might not possess any moral sophistication, but they do promote social stability, and they’re useful for getting people to sign up for armies and fight in wars with other nations. Their values feel like morality, and

AFFLUENCE The world of selling and renting private jets: DEBT How one couple paid off $44,000 in student-loan debit in one year: We decided we would just basically go all in together, we would have our joint account. We would still have personal accounts for small stuff, but all of our bills and

ADDICTION —Ben Beaumont-Thomas on how the prescription drug epidemic is manifesting itself in hip-hop music: Rap has always told its drug stories in more than just its lyrics. Snoop conjured the sensuality of his own buzz through his very vocal cadence and languorous G-funk backing, as well as his words. In Houston’s “chopped and screwed” scene,